Category: books

There’s a new editorial up today on Kotaku describing a man’s struggle with the disconnect between reality and the elaborate systems of extrinsic rewards we have used as the basis of so many things in our society. As Kotaku is a gaming news website, the role of video games in this process is of course mentioned.

This past weekend was the Dallas Comic Con, which I attended on Saturday. While there, I got glimpses of Patrick Stewart and Stan Lee, and braved the sea of people to explore the expo hall. I saw an excellent Harley Quinn win the comics category in the costume contest, and perused some wares.

Brandon Sanderson has said that one of the two main ideas for the first Mistborn novel was to create a fantasy version of a heist story like Ocean’s Eleven or Sneakers. I probably wasn’t the only one to make the connection before reading that that was his intent, so it did come across. I think the idea of a fantasy caper story is interesting, but as much as I liked Mistborn, it didn’t really satisfy me as a heist story. Maybe that’s because other elements took over more after the first part of the book.

Barry Eisler has an article in The Guardian today continuing to point out the problems with the arguments supporting legacy publishers against the Justice Department’s suit. It’s good, but what prompted this post was the great links in the article to some things I hadn’t come across before.

A lot of people are blogging lately about the civil antitrust suit the US Department of Justice filed against Apple and 5 of the Big 6 publishers. Some authors are saying some pretty ridiculous things to paint Amazon as the bad guy and the Big 6 as the underdogs, and of course the publishers themselves want you to see them this way. I found it kind of disappointing today that John Scalzi recommended people read that drivel by Charlie Stross, especially since Scalzi’s earlierpoints on the matter were so rational. I found this section of Stross’ diatribe both humorous and galling (emphasis mine): Continue reading Trust Busting

I should have mentioned this sooner, but on Friday Barry Eisler put up a nice post on his blog about the motivations of the Authors Guild. It explains the point more thoroughly than the original comment I made on the topic.

There’s been a lot going on lately. I’m writing a novel, which I started a few months (a year?) ago and then let sit. I’ve been continuing to write it intermittently, and I am at a point where I really feel a need to finish it, hopefully this year. It’s been slow going. There are always other things that demand my attention, but this is important to me and I don’t want to let it slide anymore. Honestly I’m only around twenty pages in at this point, but still.

I just finished reading Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer. I’ve mentioned it here before, but I finally got around to buying and reading it, and there’s so much more here that needs to be told than I knew.

I still haven’t stopped running away from sitting down to write. But I’m enjoying reading to Keisha when she lets me (less often since I started reading Ready Player One to her… she’d prefer to get back to The Dresden Files).

…finished Persona 3. Started playing “The Answer,” the follow-up in the FES version which I have. I also recently got Persona 4, which I will play at some point after finishing “The Answer.” I really like Persona 3. The social game aspect seems like it could be a game on its own if done well. Of course there are Japanese dating sims but most don’t reach the US and I doubt there are very many which are any good. They seem1 to follow the same patterns, with a slew of potential female partners, one each for seemingly the same categories in every one. I guess there are some that aren’t like this but I think with Persona 3/4 it’s really cool that the sim encompasses more types of relationships than just dating. I’d like to create a game with this aspect some day (I mentioned it here before, it’s called This Celestial Life).

I just watched Freakonomics on Netflix Instant Watch. There was some really interesting stuff there, like the theory about Roe v. Wade being responsible for most of the 90s’ drop in crime rate. But having read Punished by Rewards, the stuff about incentives was depressing.